Master of Invention

The Book of Disquiet (1982) is, strictly speaking, a book that isn’t a book by an author who isn’t an author. How does such a thing come into the world? Perhaps only under a very unusual configuration of stars. The great Portuguese modernist writer Fernando Pessoa might have been able to tell us: a firm believer in astrology, he would cast horoscopes for the non-existent authors whose many works he wrote. Two of these phantoms are responsible for The Book of Disquiet, although it is credited finally to only one, Bernardo Soares. The first, Vicente Guedes, slowly vanishes over the decades of its creation, lingering only as the ghost of a ghost.

It is not a book in the usual sense because it was never intended for publication, its limits never determined, its shape never finalized. It is a myriad of fragments from the diary of a man who wasn’t there, most of which were found in a trunk in Pessoa’s Lisbon apartment after his death along with over 25,000 other items: handwritten and typescript pages of poems, stories, letters, journals. This famous trunk is now preserved in the Portuguese National Library in Lisbon, while The Book of Disquiet exists in several forms imposed by different editors who have made their own decisions about how they want to organize this material. The first edition appeared in 1982, nearly fifty years after Pessoa’s death in 1935. This is an extraordinary story, of course, but it would have only curiosity value if The Book of Disquiet weren’t a masterpiece, one of the great twentieth-century works of urban lyricism and melancholy philosophy, of the endless strangeness of being alive and writing about it. I have now lived with The Book of Disquiet for more than two decades. I can’t remember on which bookshop shelf I found it, but I know that on opening it I immediately felt a sense of recognition. It is one of the best books about the inner life of a writer that I know. Take, for example, fragment 67 in Richard Zenith’s translation: Bernardo Soares, the imaginary author, describes walking down a Lisbon street and looking at the back of the man walking in front of him.

I suddenly felt a sort of tenderness on account of that man . . . This man’s back is sleeping. All of his person walking ahead of me at the same pace is sleeping. He walks unconsciously, lives unconsciously. He sleeps, for we all sleep. All life is a dream. No one knows what they’re doing, no one knows what they want, no one knows what they know. We sleep our lives, eternal children of Destiny. That’s why, whenever I think with this sensation, I feel an enormous and shapeless tenderness for all of childish humanity, for all of sleeping society, for everyone, for everything.

This is grandiose and abstract, arguably sentimental, but also familiar: I know it as a pang of emotion that I have experienced and as a primary motivating perception among the impulses for writing. Rarely is this kind of plangent feeling for the whole human predicament spoken of so clearly and directly. Often, the book has the quality of a writer being unusually honest with himself in the privacy of a diary never quite intended for publication, admitting his fears, shames and most tender or exorbitant desires. At the same time, The Book of Disquiet reads like a set of experiments in voice and perception, an anthology of verbal poses. A demonstration of the paradox of literary art, it is an artifice for telling certain kinds of truth. For Pessoa, different kinds of truth and perception belonged to different authors he created. Thereby, each kind of thought is fully vocalized and rounded out and the conversation in his head becomes a conversation between fully realized personalities. He is not the only writer to have adopted this method. Kierkegaard wrote under many pseudonyms to allow himself fully to explore a number of sometimes contradictory positions. Pessoa seems to have been less designing and more ecstatic in his multiple identities. ‘Be plural like the universe!’ he exhorts in one of his voices. From an early age he had written under pseudonyms, but his mature works became something different and unprecedented; his many named authors, their number well into three figures, are heteronyms not pseudonyms, fictional beings with their own unique biographies and styles. It seems it all started as a prank that Pessoa wanted to play on a friend, to see if he could trick him into believing in the reality of an author Pessoa had invented and whose poems he’d written:

I spent a few days trying in vain to envision this poet. One day when I’d finally given up – it was March 8, 1914 – I walked over to a high chest of drawers, took a sheet of paper, and began to write standing up, as I do whenever I can. And I wrote some thirty poems at one go, in a kind of ecstasy I’m unable to describe. It was the triumphal day of my life, and I can never have another one like it. It began with a title, The Keeper of Sheep. This was followed by the appearance in me of someone I instantly named Alberto Caeiro. Excuse the absurdity of this statement: my master had appeared in me.

Alberto Caeiro is one of four major Portuguese poets of the twentieth century who are all Fernando Pessoa. Caeiro, a naïve rural poet of the here and now, influenced the Epicurean paganism of another heteronym, the doctor Ricardo Reis, and the Whitman-like expansiveness of the engineer and traveller, and third new identity, Alvaro De Campos. There are also the poems Pessoa published under his own name. One man, four significant poets, with four different styles.

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The Book of Disquiet, now seen as Pessoa’s major prose work, seems to have been born from that one word, disquiet (desassossego), first written in the margin of a poem in 1913. This word seemed to draw to it a certain kind of prose fragment that Pessoa was writing: lonely, melancholy, plaintive, pensive, artistically impassioned. At first the fragments were associated with the heteronym Vicente Guedes, like Pessoa himself a poet and translator and owner of a hopelessly uneconomic literary press, but later and for much longer they were credited to Bernardo Soares, another poet and translator, this one working as an assistant bookkeeper in a fabric factory in Lisbon. He is not as different from Fernando Pessoa as some of the heteronyms – Pessoa described him as a ‘mutilation’ of his own personality – and this perhaps explains why he is such a capacious vehicle for his creator. Soares writes in a number of repeating modes, about literature, himself, subjectivity, sadness and what he sees. He is minutely attentive to his Lisbon neighbourhood of Baixa which he records with a patient, entranced lyricism:

Apart from cafés and dairies nothing is open yet, but the quietness is not the indolent quiet of Sunday mornings, it is simply quiet. The air has a blond edge to it and the blue sky reddens through the thinning mist. A few passers-by signal the first hesitant stirrings of life in the streets . . .

And elsewhere: ‘How human the clanking of the trams seemed! How joyful the landscape of simple rain falling in streets dragged back from the abyss. Oh, Lisbon, my home!’ It is because of such moments (here in the translations of Margaret Jull Costa) that Pessoa’s Lisbon lives on as one of the great cities of the modern imagination, like Joyce’s Dublin or Musil’s Vienna. Yellow, grey and fading, its days of glory behind it, a place of cafés and clerks and light on water, Pessoa’s Lisbon remains luminous in the memory long after reading. These concrete descriptions are an important strand of the book. They provide an emotional note of uplift and excitement in a work that is often deeply sad, and they serve a purpose akin to that which the critic Humphry House found in the descriptive passages of Tennyson’s poems, they ‘stabilize[d] his mind in the contemplation of unending processes’. For Bernardo Soares, those processes are mostly the convergent ones of writing and introspection. ‘I am, for the most part, the very prose that I write . . . I make myself a king, as children do, with a crown made from a sheet of newspaper.’ He is constantly transforming experience into art and the effect is that the feeling of fiction spreads backwards into himself: ‘In order to create, I destroyed myself; I have externalized so much of my inner life that even inside I now exist only externally. I am the living stage across which various actors pass acting out different plays.’ This is Soares’s predicament and, of course, it is Pessoa’s, but it is also, I think, a sensation familiar to anyone who has devoted much energy to writing, who has treated their own memories and perceptions as raw materials and intellectual propositions. Soares takes refuge in this work which he esteems above all others (‘literature, which is art married to thought and the immaculate realization of reality, seems to me the goal towards which all human effort should be directed’), but it also intensifies his isolation. Photographs of Fernando Pessoa show a man apart, even when he is in company. Always immaculately dressed, combed and bespectacled, there is a Prufrockian sadness about him. At times, he looks oddly like a life-sized cut-out figure among real people. Richard Zenith’s superb new biography, Pessoa: An Experimental Life (2021), gives some idea of the complex circumstances that created this unique figure. They include early bereavement and an inadmissible homosexuality. To them Pessoa ascribes his cerebral nature: in Richard Zenith’s translation of The Book of Disquiet we find, from April 1930,

The cause in me of this profound and ever-present feeling of incongruity with others is, I believe, that most people think with their feelings, whereas I feel with my thinking. For the ordinary man, to feel is to live and to think is to know how to live. For me, to think is to live and to feel merely food for thought.

Bernardo Soares is certainly an extreme case of solitude, sadness and artistic compulsion, and that is part of the appeal of the book, the feeling that he has gone out ahead of you into his loneliness and despair. He has foresuffered all. There is a catharsis and assuagement to be had from its moments of lament that is like that of tragedy or the blues. There are few writers who can hit a note of grief as pure as this:

Time! The past! . . . What was and will never be again! What I had and will never have again! The Dead! The dead who loved me when I was a child. When I remember them, my whole soul grows cold and I feel myself to be an exile from every heart, alone in the night of my own self, crying like a beggar at the closed silence of every door.

His investigation of his own more quotidian sadness produces subtle illuminations:

I realize that I’m always sad, however happy or content I may often feel. And the part of me that realizes this stands a little behind me, as if it were leaning over me standing at the window, and stares out, with more piercing eyes than mine, over my shoulder and over my head at the slow, slightly undulating rain that filigrees the brown, evil air.

I find comfort in this state of complete and recognized unhappiness, akin to Samuel Beckett’s monochrome prose. It reminds me of the line of Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles that Beckett loved: ‘When grief ceases to be speculative, sleep sees her opportunity.’ It is partly for this that The Book of Disquiet is one that I turn to in the hours of darkness. It is a friend to my deepest solitude, to the innermost part of me where my own personality seems speculative and external, a product of my passing thoughts, a place few books go. And it is beautiful, constantly surprising and diverting. It was not written in a linear way and does not demand linear reading. Rather, it opens up around you. One can wander in it, a flâneur of thought in Pessoa’s Soares’s melancholy city. I never know exactly what I’ll stumble on when I open it: perhaps a description of a man singing in the street or of the waiter in the café where Bernard Soares has lunch, or these clouds:

Clouds . . . Today I’m conscious of the sky, for there are days when I feel it without looking at it, living in the city and not in the world of nature that includes it. Clouds . . . Today they are the main reality, worrying me as if the veiling of the sky were one of the great dangers of my destiny . . . Clouds . . . They pass from the sea to the Castle, from west to east, in a scattered and naked tumult . . . I exist without knowing it and will die without wanting to. I’m the gap between what I am and am not, between what I dream and what life makes of me.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 81 © Adam Foulds 2024